Apple still isn’t done building its dream iPad

The idea that the iPad is a magical piece of glass is so Apple-esque that I’d developed a false memory of Steve Jobs describing it that way when he &t=7s">unveiled the first one in 2010. He didn’t, and I’m not positive just when the company embraced the metaphor. It dates at least to the press release for 2014’s iPad Air 2 and has stuck around ever since.

So, recently, when I spoke with Apple senior VP of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak and senior VP of hardware engineering John Ternus about the company’s newest iPads, which go on sale today, I wasn’t shocked when both turned to it. Especially since the new iPad Pro—Apple’s thinnest product ever—really leans into the aim of feeling like something simpler and more inviting than the powerful computing device it is.

“We’ve always had this vision of an iPad being this magical sheet of glass that allows you to interact directly with your content,” Ternus told me. “And so, what we were excited to do with this new iPad Pro is push the boundaries of how thin and light we could go without compromise. We have the best display we’ve ever put into an iPad. We have the best performance we’ve ever put into iPad. We haven’t given up anything on battery life or durability, and we think that just makes the ultimate iPad experience.”

New processors are inextricably associated with leaps in performance, and always have been. In a funny way, that’s an issue for the iPad: Even years-old models still feel zippy, which means that a torrid new processor is not, in itself, a huge incentive to upgrade for most people. “We try to tell the story of Apple silicon, and people are used to, maybe, an Intel story,” says Joswiak. “That it’s all about, ‘Well, didn’t it just get 5% faster or something?”

That’s why Apple is taking pains to point out that its new M4 chip enables two of the new iPad Pro’s most obvious improvements, neither of which relates to how snappy it feels: its thinner, lighter form factor and “tandem” OLED display. A less advanced processor couldn’t have delivered sufficient performance and battery life in such a svelte package, and the screen’s use of two OLED layers required a chip capable of pushing out all those pixels.

That Apple is in a position to incorporate the technologies it needs into the chips it designs doesn’t just explain how it was able to build the thin, powerful iPad Pro. It’s also why the M4 is showing up first in the iPad Pro rather than a Mac: Rather than being a Mac processor repurposed for an iPad, it was conceived from the start to drive the iPad Pro’s new OLED screen.

“Our chip team was able to build that controller into the road map,” explains Joswiak. “And the place they could put it was the M4.”

“Everything just got a lot cleaner”

The iPad’s magical-glass premise may have remained consistent over the years, but what was once a single device available in one size is now a portfolio of products tailored to different customers. Along with the iPad known simply as the iPad, there’s an iPad Mini and two sizes apiece of the iPad Air and iPad Pro. All of them work with various versions of Apple’s Pencil stylus and keyboard cases, giving the platform a Transformer-like versatility it lacked in its early days.

As the iPad has become more things to more people, it hasn’t always spoken for itself all that clearly. In 2022, for instance, Apple introduced a 10th-generation entry-level iPad that had much in common with the iPad Pro and iPad Air. But rather than replacing the decidedly old-school 9th-generation version, it existed with it at a higher price point. The iPad Air, though good, wasn’t quite up to playing the role of MacBook Air to the iPad Pro’s MacBook Pro. And the Apple Pencil was trapped in a vortex of compatibility issues, with three versions whose relationship to various iPads required a fair amount of explanation.

iPad watchers (including me) tended to obsess over the lineup’s muddiness, taking it as diminished clarity of vision on Apple’s part. The fact that 2023 came and went without any new iPad models didn’t help.

Joswiak acknowledges that the iPad portfolio had gotten a bit messy and says that fixing that was one goal of last week’s announcements: “We simplified the lineup story, we simplified the Pencil story,” he says. “Everything just got a lot cleaner.”

To wit, the 10th-generation iPad’s price has been reduced to $349, with the 9th-generation version now in semi-retirement as a specialty item for the education market. The iPad Air and iPad Pro are now both available in small and large versions, more closely paralleling the MacBook Air and Pro. Both support the same Pencils: the new $129 Pencil Pro and the $79 Pencil USB-C, the latter of which is also compatible with the 10th-generation iPad.

More than any other Apple product, the iPad is defined by its relationship to its major accessories, the Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard. Making the whole system work is a responsibility as well as an opportunity, and one that’s reflected in the new products.

For example, Ternus says that iPads are predominantly used in landscape orientation these days, a shift from the tablet’s origins as a more iPhone-like, portrait-oriented device. That evolution cried out for a relocation of the tablet’s front-facing camera from the portrait edge to the landscape edge, so that it would be centered for video calls rather than off on the side. Such a move was complicated by one of the best features of an iPad Pro (and now iPad Air): Pencils cling to the landscape edge magnetically for storing and recharging.

“We had to come up with a completely new architecture,” Ternus says. “We actually reduced the size of the inductive charging solution—it’s less than half the size of the previous version, so that we could colocate all those components together and make it work.” Practically nobody who uses an iPad will give a moment’s thought to that technical achievement. But the first Pencil to use the new charging technology, the new Pencil Pro, also introduces a handy squeeze gesture, haptic feedback, “barrel roll” adjustment of virtual art tools, and Find My compatibility. All of which add meaningfully to the iPad experience even if they aren’t built into an iPad, and help reduce the pain of plunking down $129 for the Pencil Pro even if you already own a Pencil that isn’t compatible with the new iPads.

“Tablets suck, and iPads don’t”

Along with hearing Joswiak and Ternus wax enthusiastic about the new iPads, talking to them was an opportunity to get an update on what, exactly, an iPad is. Today, there are tablets that run Windows, Android, or ChromeOS, some of them based on hardware in the same conceptual zip code as an iPad. But despite early predictions that the iPad-like products might come to displace PCs in their more conventional form, it turned out that Apple’s tablet—with its rich library of apps designed for big-screen, touch-first interaction—occupies a category of one. (“I hesitate to call it a tablet, because tablets suck, and iPads don’t,” clarifies Joswiak.)

The iPad’s rise also coincided with a period when Mac fans fretted that Apple regarded the Mac as a legacy platform, more in maintenance mode than crucial to its future. In 2020, the company resoundingly dispelled such concerns by shipping the first Macs based on its own processors. Yet the Mac’s ongoing resurgence has probably helped fuel more recent worries about the iPad’s fate, as if the two platforms were duking it out for relevance. A new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman that touchscreen Macs could finally show up next year raises the possibility of even more direct competition.

Not surprisingly, Joswiak argues there’s plenty of room for both the iPad and Mac in Apple’s vision of where personal computing is going—in part because it’s already clear that there’s room for both in its customers’ lives.

“The fact is that the majority of Mac customers have an iPad, and they use them both,” he says. “And a large proportion of iPad customers have a Mac, or even some of them have [Windows] PCs. You use the tool that makes the most sense for you at that time. They’re two different tools.”

Lots of iPad enthusiasts covet the sort of flexibility and customizability that MacOS has always offered and iPadOS, in its current form, does not. Maybe Apple will make them happy with announcements at next month’s WWDC. But Ternus also pushes back on the notion that the iPad Pro is less than “pro”—a term, he says, that isn’t defined by the Mac.

“There’s a funny perception thing,” he says. “Maybe it’s Mac people with their notion of what professional is. You saw what the Procreate team has done with Apple Pencil Pro. There is no more professional drawing application in the world than Procreate—I mean, they’re the lifeblood of artists.”

“Don’t worry, we know what we’re doing here”

In 2024, it’s tough to imagine artificial intelligence going unmentioned during any major tech product launch. That technology, and the subset known as machine learning, got plenty of play during ">Apple’s streamed “Let Loose” iPad event. Along with touting the AI prowess of the M4’s Neural Engine, Apple executives pointed out some of the myriad iPad elements that already incorporate AI, including Live Text capture, Center Stage intelligent webcam framing, and features in apps such as Photomator and Apple’s own new Logic Pro for iPad 2 audio editor.

Still, Apple’s approach to framing AI stands in contrast to those of other tech giants. It’s not just unusually resistant to pre-announcing stuff; it’s also less prone than most to getting swept up in trends just because they seem cool. Those dynamics have contributed to a persistent notion that the company is “behind in AI.” Meanwhile, the race to dominate AI has only turbocharged the rest of the industry’s enduring predilection for showing off rough drafts of dazzling work in progress—such as Google’s next-generation “Astra” assistant, which it teased this week at its I/O developer conference.

By reminding people that products such as the iPad are bursting with AI that doesn’t go out of its way to call attention to itself, is Apple seeking credit for existing achievements that sometimes go unnoticed? “I think we have been leaders in this area for quite some time,” says Joswiak, noting that AI was at the heart of “proactive” Siri features that debuted way back in 2015. “I think ‘credit’ maybe is the wrong word. But [we’re] just maybe giving customers the comfort of ‘Don’t worry, we know what we’re doing here.'”

It’s nigh impossible to imagine that AI won’t be the story at WWDC, where Apple will preview the operating-system upgrades that will land on the iPad and other devices in the fall. Until then, its AI narrative for 2024 is incomplete, and the new iPads tell us only so much about where the platform may be headed. But as the entire PC business hypes the emerging concept of the “AI PC,” Apple is quick to emphasize that it’s years into the process of setting the technological stage for such an era.

“We’ve been building in neural engines since before the PC industry knew how to say ‘neural,'” says Joswiak. “And now, they’re building in neural processing units, hoping to maybe get to 60%, in the next couple years, of the PCs that they sell being AI PCs . . . All these iPads that we’re introducing with this advanced Apple silicon are quite capable AI PCs.”

Whatever comes next, hearing a member of the Apple brain trust characterize the iPad as an AI PC—and therefore a competitor to everything else the industry describes as one—is is a little startling. After a period of uncertainty, I choose to take it as a hopeful sign that the company sees its 14-year-old tablet’s potential as anything but tapped out.

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